Are Digg the best linkbaiters of all-time?
Everyone always talks about how SEO’s manipulate social media websites such as Digg in order to potentially gain hundreds of natural inbound links from the huge amount of traffic generated from promoted stories. Seeing that SEO’s are getting quite a bit of stick I thought I’d take a look at this from a slightly different angle and by analysing some of the inbound link stats Digg aren’t doing too badly themselves!
A story which made the Digg homepage last week from TechEBlog titled top 5 Google tricks was arguably a piece of content crafted specifically for the social media audiences. But linkbait or not the story was successful and what I found particually interesting was that while this generated 725 inbound links the actual Digg story also gained a similar total with 688 links.
So for every pathetic SEO who profits from Digg (I won’t link to the original source of this video as he doesn’t like linkbait!) the link juice seems to be shared fairly evenly, also benefiting Digg very nicely too. Looking at the overall inbound link totals in comparison to some of the sites whose stories regularly appear on the social media homepages and unsurprisingly there’s a massive difference:
Digg - 80,581,285
SEOmoz - 512,025
Pronet Advertising - 198,313
Tropical SEO - 13,803
It would be impossible for any SEO to replicate anywhere near this level of links generated as several hundred new links are being added to each Digg version of every promoted story, so essentially Digg are getting there own linkbait projects for free!
